The Shift with Sam Baker Betsy Lerner is on a mission to destigmatise mental health in her 60s
My guest this week is the novelist Betsy Lerner.
Now Betsy is here to talk about her critically acclaimed debut novel, Shred Sisters, which takes us from the 1970s to the 90s and tells us the story of two troubled sisters, Amy and Ollie. No less a legend than Patti Smith described it as “moving like a souped up pick up truck” - and who am I to argue with Patti, it does! I loved it.
Betsy only turned to fiction in her early sixties. Before that she had a prolific career in the publishing industry spanning thirty years as an editor and literary agent working on such classics as Prozac Nation, Autobiography of a Face and Just Kids.
But she hasn’t stopped there, Betsy has also built a large following on TikTok, where she shares passages from her diaries or the 'chronicles of disappointment, depression and loneliness' as she calls them, that she kept in her 20s when she was cycling through the highs and lows of bipolar disorder.
Betsy joined me to talk about sibling rivalry, ageing, heartbreak and the family secret that shaped her. We also discussed escaping the maternal mantle of judgement, her personal mission to destigmatise mental illness, disordered eating, gratitude and why she loves “her twenty somethings” on TikTok.
CW: bereavement, mental health, miscarriage.
* You can buy all the books mentioned in this podcast at The Shift bookshop on Bookshop.org, including Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner as well as the book that inspired this podcast, The Shift: how I lost and found myself after 40 - and you can too, by me.
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